Beautiful November
by Whiggity
Summary: In her limned profile lies a truth self-evident. It's not until she's already gone that he thinks to wonder if she'd even cast a shadow.


Wirt watches the tea the entire time, waiting for it to steep, buzzing halophosphorescence lending the Earl Grey a greenish tint as it clouds darker and darker. He counts, almost unconsciously _("fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. One, two, three…"),_ three full minutes to ensure it comes out just right, and then removes the disintegrating bag and drops it into one of the cereal bowls in the sink. One spoonful of sugar, two splashes of milk, and he takes the cup with trembling hands and presents it to Beatrice where she sits at the kitchen table, which is really a card table, wobbly-legged and topped with vinyl, the only thing that would fit in the small room when he moved in. The window next to it is cracked open, just slightly, and the grimy paint-crusted sill before it glistens with water. The rain has finally stopped, and somewhere outside, birds sing. The sun is going to come up soon.

She looks at the drink, and then at him, and offers a tired, unfulfilling smile, which he reciprocates despite himself as he pulls out the other chair and sits down. Her pale fingers draw slowly along the mouth of the teacup before she sniffs and moves to pick it up; "It's hot," he tries to warn her, but she drinks it nonetheless, first sipping and then fully gulping it down like she hasn't drunk in a hundred years. When she sets it back down, the dregs at the bottom of the cup are still steaming.

"You make good tea," she says, and it's stupid, but he's a little touched by that.

"Thanks," he says, while she wipes her mouth with the back of her speckled forearm. "If it involves boiling water, you, uh – you better believe I've got a pretty good handle on how to make it."

She smiles again, and looks more like she means it this time. She shrugs off the towel she'd been given to dry herself with and lays it over the back of her chair; "Guess you're not as useless as I remember," she murmurs, and sets her bright blue eyes on his. "You've changed. You look different."

He has a lump in his throat. "It happens, I suppose."

"I've never been anywhere like this before." Nearly the first thing she'd done, when he finally got her inside, out of the rain, was make big eyes at his television and refrigerator. "Makes sense you'd live in a place as weird as you are."

"Yeah, well," he says, all of his heart in on the attempt not to sound as sad as he feels. "I could say the same to you."

"That's fair." She turns back toward the window and her hand aimlessly drifts into the space under her chin, trailing down the ridges of her throat. Over the low, indistinct urban skyline, the firmament is turning gray. "I wish… I could see more of it."

"When the sun comes up."

"Yeah. Sure." She sniffs again, as if with the beginnings of a cold, and adjusts the bodice of her blue dress, smeared with rich black mud from where he'd found her curled beneath the old oak in the graveyard. That she should be there, that he should have come across her on just such a night as this, seemed strangely ineluctable; it was as easily given as the content of a dream, and he'd gathered her up like she weighed nothing to bring her home. Or so he must presume. How else could they have gotten back?

Beatrice lifts the teacup and tries to take another drink before realizing that it's empty. "I can make some more," he offers. She shrugs.

"Is Greg here?"

"No. He lives at home."

"This isn't home?"

"It's _my_ home," he says, and lets his gaze crawl across the narrow yellow kitchen and the dark living room beyond. "Or it's where I live, at least. But not with Greg."

"I bet he misses you."

"I miss him. But, you know –" He tries to keep things light, he really does. "That's how it goes, right? Growing up, and all." And it's all he can do not to dwell on the seventeen-year-old girl sitting across the table from him, who has not grown up at all since their first and last long-ago goodbye, a creature of dark and heavy youth.

For a while they don't speak again, as the sky to the east changes from gray to white to gold, cutting through the rain-washed air with the promise of a beautiful November. Sunlight trickles slowly toward them across rooftops, and he watches as Beatrice takes a very deep and careful breath, designed not to betray any emotion. "I hope your family's been doing well," he says finally. "All things considered."

And she turns to him as the first true morning sun lights upon the left half of her face, and says to him in turn, "I hope the same for yours."

The light sets her hair ablaze, brings out the red undertones in her skin. For the first time, wonder pierces the fugue of unreality that settles in the early morning hours, and his heart catches in his throat. He should take her by the shoulders, pull her closer across the kitchen table, and tell her – tell her what? Something important.

He reaches for her hand where it sits in an infant sunspot, but his fingers encounter nothing there but the tacky click of vinyl.

Somehow, he isn't really surprised.

She draws her fingers back into the shadows to examine them. He had carried her before, in the dark, but when he lifts his hands now to, shakingly, place them on either side of her face, only his left touches flesh. The golden half, day-bright, is as air. He licks his dry lips, pulls her chin up to meet his eyes, and he tells her the most important thing he can think of:

"We're going to have to say goodbye again."

At first she looks almost angry, her brows creasing and mouth thinning with reactionary venom – but then she stops, and she turns her head, turns away from the light. "I… you're right," she says, but when she squeezes her eyes closed a bare tear makes tracks down her face. He wipes it away with a thumb, but in the sunlight, his skin still feels dry. "I mean… You're right. God, I hate it when you're right. I liked it better when you were always wrong about everything."

"Those were the days," he says dolefully, and even he can't deny the humor in acceptance of his own uselessness as it leaches into his voice. Beatrice snorts, and scrubs her face, and turns to look at him again, fighting a smile that's almost as clear as the morning itself.

"Seems unfair," she mumbles. "That I've only just got here, and now I have to go." He feels it achingly, like a little hole drilled in his sternum. "That you could go walking with me for weeks at a time, but I can't walk with you."

"I mean… it's really not a great deal for _either_ of us."

"I deserve a fair shake, though," she murmurs, looking out the window now, to see what she can of the world before she has to leave it. "I deserve a little time in the sun."

She turns back to him, a ghost unable to stand up to the scrutiny of day, a girl in blue with a halo unchanging, closer now to his little brother's age than to his own. Too beautiful, too young, so very much the same. She says, "Tell Greg I wanted to see him, okay? Tell him I… I wished he could have been here."

"I will," he says, but he knows it is a lie. He will keep this moment inside himself, he will not burden a child with such a weight, and if Beatrice never forgives him for that, he will deserve nothing less. It's selfish, it's terrible, but he doesn't feel strong enough to accept death into his life again. Not now. He has moved on; he has grown up.

If one treads carefully, the distinction between a solitary, impossible experience and a dream can become almost meaningless.

He holds her hands while the kitchen floods with living sunlight to drown dead fluorescence. He can't tell for sure when there are no longer any long, pale fingers in between his own.

And really, it's better this way.

–

Eventually, the alarm clock in his room goes off, and Wirt wakes up and lifts his head from the table to squint blearily in the fair light of midmorning. He's stiff and exhausted, but he has work to do, and he rises to shower, to change, to prepare for the day. To wash out the cold teacup still sitting on the kitchen table, and put the towel draped over the chair opposite his own into the hamper.

As he eats breakfast, he sees a bird perched in the branches of the tree outside the window. It is blue. Probably a jay. It seems to look at him briefly, but only twitters and flits away.

It leaves nothing in its stead but a thought, a feeling, and an instant of swaying foliage.


End file.
